Makella Brems is a third-year doctoral candidate in Political Science and incoming MFA student at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and writing focus on the long-term political implications of human-caused ecological crises. For her dissertation, Brems draws upon insights from the republican tradition to develop a political environmentalism, which argues that the preservation of the natural world is essential to human freedom.
 
Brems is a Presidential Fellow and an Environmental Humanities (EHUM) Graduate Student Affiliate at Notre Dame. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich in 2022, where she presented a paper on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Climate Crisis. Brems has also presented at the Western Political Science Association Conference and the EHUM Graduate Workshop Series. Brems received her B.A. in Government from Claremont McKenna College, where she captained the CMS Varsity Women’s Soccer Team.